Dear Agency Founder

Why design agency founders get trapped

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Design agencies are different to marketing agencies.

You could frame it as systems vs creativity, or ahrefs vs Figma, or retainer vs projects.

But fundamentally it’s because design is different to marketing.

It requires a different brain.

I wouldn’t say design is easier than marketing. But I do think that the brain that can do it is more scarce.

And that shapes a lot of things.

Where design agencies come from

A design agency usually doesn’t get founded. It just happens to someone.

Someone with design talent gets so much in demand that a business appears around them. And they have just enough business sense to put it together.

That combination, it transpires, is potent.

Design talent plus entrepreneurial spirit makes for someone who is extraordinarily effective at identifying problems and solving them. Their clients end up very happy. Referrals start flooding in. And they turn those referrals into work with very little effort, because they show up to sales calls knowing exactly what they’re talking about.

Everything you need for a successful business is there. With one problem.

An identity problem

Design agency founders are reluctant entrepreneurs. They’ve seen “sales” in action and their inbox is full of outreach. Never in a million years would they act like that, so they identify as someone who doesn’t sell or market to people.

This leads to them remaining a naive maverick in these areas, unable to understand what’s working or ever scale that secret sauce.

Let me talk to those founders for a moment.

If you are in business, then you are selling and marketing.

If you don’t know you are doing those things, then you are incredibly good at it.

Go to a big, successful agency and you’ll find business development teams trying incredibly hard to be consultative, authentic and authoritative.

They are trying to be you.

The scaling problem

What happens when you try to grow?

As an unaware sales superstar you can get far, but you will hit a ceiling. Sometimes this can be years in, when company culture and your own habits are set.

Moving beyond your referral network when it’s so tempting just to lean on that network and focus your attention elsewhere is hard.

But Trap 1. That type of pipeline relies on you.

And then there’s the fact that design, as a discipline, doesn’t like to be scaled.

A lot of marketing can be broken down into systems. Repeatable tactics. Campaign maintenance. You can document those things and hire people specifically to run them.

Design is harder to systematise. The talent required is scarce and the work is rarely the same twice.

Every project needs that experienced head. (Trap 2)

Adding and managing clients is hard too. Not because clients aren’t happy. But because the way the founder keeps them happy is with their own design effort. (Trap 3)

To afford expensive people, you need to know your delivery margins. You need to know what your rate has to be. You need a clear picture of project profitability.

But roll back to how these businesses begin. A talented person with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Those financial metrics are often not in place. In fact, “financial metrics” sits close to “sales” in the list of dirty words.

And when it’s just you, you can get round them anyway.

Working the weekend. Discounting hours to keep the client happy.

All leaving a mess where a project profitability report should be.

Not the foundation from which you confidently commit to a large new hire.

But who’s got time for reports when the projects need you? (Trap 4)

The ceiling

Design agencies are different because design talent is in demand and they grow around people.

This makes them amazingly effective up to a point.

They hit a ceiling of what that person can support.

How do you replace yourself?

You can do it on vibes.

Or you can recognise the value you bring and sort your numbers to the point where you can pay for someone else to deliver that value.

Honestly, it’ll be a bit of both. An opportunity may present itself. A lucky junior hire that overdelivers, or a price-insensitive client that delivers margin even with your poor financial tracking.

And then that headroom lets you start to sort things out.

But only if you spot the chance. Only if you identify with the entrepreneur inside that got you into this.

Say it with me.

“I do sales.”

What a chance encounter taught me about cold email

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every meaningful relationship you have right now exists because someone reached out.

And if you think back to how they did it… you can learn something.

We’ve done bad

How did we get so bad at the simple act of introducing ourselves to someone we don’t know?

How did we get to the point where we spend time screenshotting people’s attempts and posting them with the caption “look at this idiot”?

I’m not blaming you for outreach shaming. We all do it.

We do it because we’re frustrated. Frustrated at the sheer volume of emails and DMs we have to wade through.

But the unwanted outcome is that we so don’t want to add to the pile that we’ve decided we shouldn’t bother trying to meet anyone new.

Sure, you can grow a business without proactively reaching out. Many of us get very comfortable with referral life. But writing it off entirely isn’t helpful. It’s a viable channel. At certain points of growth, it’s the right channel. You just need to do it well.

The people who get outreach shamed aren’t doing it well.

They’ve done it so badly you’ve recoiled.

The person who does it well? You didn’t even really notice.

The hotbox (a short story)

When I started university, everyone from my course on the first day was put into a room together.

It was a hot day and the room barely big enough for us all. No one knew anyone.

People started chatting because of proximity. The person next to me was asking questions that required commitments. What clubs had I looked at? What were my plans after this awkward fest? Did I think everyone was going for a drink.

I didn’t like it and moved away.

As I moved away and failed to connect with (actively avoided) anyone else, I found myself heading for the door.

I stepped outside into the corridor and felt the cool air. Relax.

I would have got my smartphone out, but they weren’t invented yet (why are you so ageist?), so I read a notice board.

There was another guy out there from the course. We silently acknowledged each other and stood a comfortable distance apart, sharing a silent moment in the cool air of the corridor.

Then he spoke.

“It fucking stinks in there.”

That was it. No pitch, no ask, no agenda.

Just a relatable comment about how it “fucking stinks in there”

We became best mates.

Granted, I’ve never bought anything off him.

OK here’s the lesson

Introducing yourself well isn’t about forcing the issue, it’s about being in the right places (the corridor), at the right time (the course intro day), being passively visible (the nod of acknowledgement when I came out) and then taking the opportunity (the thing he said, I won’t swear again).

That isn’t easy, it doesn’t happen every day, it’s much softer than an offer in an email.

It involves doing things that feel like they are getting you nowhere. Like showing up in places and helping without asking for anything back.

But new introductions don’t happen at all unless you are proactive.

How you make them happen is your choice, whether you need to make them happen is not.

Track time for now. Tomorrow it will be tokens.

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As an agency founder you can identify as lots of things.

Entrepreneur (hard to spell but nice to say)
Leader (for the LinkedIn)
Imposter (not a real syndrome btw, just a belief)

Probably the most important thing you are… is an allocator of resource.

However many people are on your team, however many clients you have, however you bill, you are deciding where effort goes and for how long.

To know if you’re doing that well, you need to measure it.

Knowing how you’re allocating resource means knowing your profitability. It’s how you grow. And it’s how you eventually get out of delivery.

And ultimately this is your job.

You’re taking an asset your business has and investing it.

Are you doing that well?

What’s your unit of resource?

Let me save you some time. It’s time.

You might not do hourly billing. You might think/know/wonder if the billable hour is dead. You might do value-based pricing or performance-based pricing or any-based pricing.

None of that matters for this conversation.

We’re not talking about how you bill. We’re talking about how you allocate resource. And for that, time is your unit.

Not because it’s perfect.

It very much isn’t.

Time is flawed

If I spend an hour on your project first thing in the morning after good night’s sleep, no interruptions, genuinely struck by inspiration, that hour is worth quite a lot.

The hour the following day, after a heavy lunch, when something’s gone wrong with the API and I can’t get it to urgh igiveup… that hour is worth considerably less. The bit of work I did turns out to be pretty meaningless. The hour isn’t worth the clock it ticked around.

Those two units are not the same.

Time is blunt, imprecise, and occasionally infuriating. But energy and inspiration have no measurements.

But value is the output. We need to track the input. (Because the difference is profit)

So time is far from perfect but it’s the best thing we have.

Knowing what each unit costs

The other thing you need to know is what you pay for each unit of resource.

This is a bit easier for your team or freelancers. It’s the salary or the invoice.

It’s harder when it’s you. What even is your pay? Profit? The random amounts you withdraw depending on how you’re doing?

An hour of effort in a month where you paid yourself less is not cheaper than an hour in a month where you paid yourself a bonus. The cost of your time doesn’t change because your cashflow did.

Base it on what your salary should be.

Does that mean you aren’t making a profit anymore? Well that’s unpleasant, certainly. But knowing it is how you grow.

What all of this gives you

When you know how many hours everyone spends, and what those hours cost, you can work out which of your clients makes you the big money. And which of them barely makes you any money at all.

You can fix clients and rates and get yourself to a position where all the resource you need is other people. You know what it costs. You know it makes money. You can choose the clients and price the projects that build a business that doesn’t rely on you billing.

And if you’re not allocating yourself as a resource and you’ve genuinely stepped out of delivery then congratulations.

You don’t have to track your time anymore (but your team do).

But I do value-based pricing

Great. I like you for that. Please continue to read my newsletter.

Here’s the thing. A 10K workshop where you’ve imparted a day’s worth of knowledge that transforms someone’s strategy. That is still a day of your time.

You could have spent that time on something else. You were wise not to. But you still allocated your time.

And hopefully at some point you’ll have to choose between the client doing 10K workshops and the one doing 15K. But those 15K workshops take a bit longer to prep for.

Which one is actually more profitable?

You need to know.

This article has a shelf life

I want to end on something we’re still working out.

Everything above applies to human resource. But there’s a new kind of resource creeping into agency delivery.

AI tokens.

Right now, if you’re using AI tools across your business, you’re probably treating the cost as software overhead. That’s fine. Honestly, it’s probably the right call for now. But you should know what you’re spending.

The LLM providers are in land grab mode, making a loss on those tokens in exchange for getting you hooked on their software.

There’s 2 ways this plays out. They work out how to deliver cheaper or they start upping those prices. It’s happening already. Notice the “fast” modes that are appearing. Known also as “we don’t want to say that normal mode is a bit slow now”.

Token allocation per project will be on your reports soon.

Can’t wait.

Until then, track your time.

Cold outreach is like wearing a giant green hat

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wondering if you can get good at winning work from emails is the same as wondering if you can look good in a big green hat.

It’s all about how you wear it.

If you’ve never worn one before and then one day just stick it on and walk out the door? No one knows why you are wearing it and you look ridiculous.

That’s your cold email.

Buy from me. Here’s my case study. Click this link. People back away. The first impression is look at me energy with notable headwear.

And we know we are going to see you again in 3 days time, on a schedule, checking in, with the hat. You aren’t wearing it for us, you’re wearing it for you.

But there are people who pull it off.

Look at the catwalks of Paris, London, Milan. Full of giant green hats (probably). And people think they look great. They seek out photos. They pay to be on the front row.

The people wearing them haven’t just suddenly put them on and hoped for the best. They’ve spent time cultivating a position as trendsetters. They’ve shown they understand hats at any size. They’ve piqued your curiosity around what colour hat might be the next big thing.

And they’ve done this over a long period of time. Built reputation and relationships to the point where, when they finally put on the giant green hat, everyone says, “That’s bloody brilliant.”

Selling by email (or any selling really) is no different.

If your first message is on the nose? You’re the person who just walked into the room wearing a giant green hat with no context.

But if you’ve managed to make someone aware of you, because your content made them curious, your comments made them think, your name kept showing up in the right places, then when you eventually reach out to talk about that project or ask for that meeting, what you offer looks a lot more interesting.

That takes years.

Same offer. Same hat.

You’ve just earned the right to wear it.

The rules apply to you

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ever looked at financial KPIs and thought - “one day I’ll care”?

Because when you are small it’s easy, just you and the revenue, no surprises.

Won a new project? It’s going to be a good couple of months.

Tax bill time? Cash is going down a bit.

There’s one number that matters - the bank balance.

You’ve got a couple of spreadsheets you’ve pulled together, probably motivated by one of those tax bills. But that’s as CF-oh as you’ve CF-got.

Gross profit, COGS, delivery margins, staff cost ratio, real rate calculations, EBITDA. These are all for big agencies where the founder long ago stopped doing what they love and are instead stuck looking at graphs.

Shapes and numbers that control our lives (like playing cards can if you play too much poker).

However (it was coming!) you do have those things.

Just because you are small doesn’t mean you don’t have delivery margins, or net profit. They are just tangled up in you and how you work.

Calculating KPIs requires good data. Salaries, invoices, timesheets. Billed and unbilled time. Full transparency.

Yours are hard to calculate because you’ve got a business to run and you won’t let them sit still.

You take random amounts out of the business each month as pay. You discount that piece of work the client didn’t like. You’re not tracking time (or at least not the bit extra you did).

Just because they are hard to calculate doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

But it’s fine because you can instinctively know whether you are profitable because the bank balance goes up. And it’s obvious which of your clients makes you the money (the one on the higher rate that doesn’t keep asking for changes). And I know you know which one doesn’t.

Except it doesn’t take much to lose touch with those instincts.

A new hire or freelance cost means you now have delivery costs that don’t bend any more.

A rate negotiation because the client is buying big could mean you have to suddenly know what margin you’ll make.

The bank balance starts to include larger costs you need to pay and money that you’ve had to collect for the taxman (or taxwoman).

Getting the numbers wrong now can really get you stuck on large projects with bad rates or get left short for cash.

It becomes apparent you had KPIs all along, and if you could see them they would tell you things aren’t right.

So it’s never too early.

You can still do all the over-servicing and discounting you need to grow, and you can still take less out on the slow months, you’ll just have a clear picture of what that means.

Consider these now:

Put all VAT (or sales tax) aside the moment revenue comes in. For profit-based tax, calculate what you owe at the end of each month and put that aside too.
Set yourself a salary commensurate with the market rate for what you deliver. Even when you don’t take it all out, it’s important to know what you would have cost. Use this figure as your own delivery cost when calculating margins.
Track everyone’s time. Even if you don’t bill by the hour or day, log what people spend on each project.
Use that time data, your staff costs (salaries, taxes, pensions) and any freelancer bills to work out what it costs you to deliver work for each client.
Use the invoices from each client to work out what you earn from them.
Now subtract the delivery costs from what you earned to get your delivery margin for each client. A healthy benchmark is 55%–65%.
Finally, divide what you earned by the total time spent to find your effective hourly rate. At reasonable utilisation, this should be upwards of 2.5x the blended hourly cost of the people doing the work.

Dip your toe into the bath of financial KPIs - today might be the day you start to care.

And these are for you to own, every expert does it a bit differently, find what’s useful now and go with it.

However small you are, something is more useful than nothing.

The one thing I'll never do to you

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent a bit of time on LinkedIn the last few days and I need to say something.

It’s all horsebutt.

A load of people have learnt how to hack my brain. I get a little jolt: “I need to care about this.” So I click, scroll and look for closure on that feeling.

And then I realise there’s nothing there.

And now not only did I waste the attention I just paid. I didn’t learn anything or move forward in any way at all.

Stupid language hacks, funnels and algorithms.

Fair play to humanity - we did this amazingly 🎖️

So this one is for you if you are prone to a tired excursion into the sea of authority built on your insecurity that is today’s internet.

You’re using your resources, your attention, your energy, your investment to its absolute max. You’re operating inside a chaotic system. Micro chaos: clients, staff. Macro chaos: the economy, the market. And you’re growing chaotically because of that.

You don’t need to know all of this stuff.

Sure, there are moments where you need to learn something new. You hit a common growth problem and you deal with it. But there are always gonna be problems.

It’s problems all the way up.

Deal with a problem too early and it’ll slow you down just as much.

Installing a CRM before you have any contacts, build a list without an offer, writing automated proposal processes before you’ve closed anything.

Pointless.

You need to start without all that. And as you grow, things slowly become inappropriate for the size and scale you are. Then you adjust.

That’s how you got this far.

And I know you only see the problems.

And that’s why when someone writes a post about that problem you get sucked in.

Having sucked someone in the author can choose to help you or manipulate you. Truthfully, running a business means doing a bit of both. I hope I never overstep the line.

Overstepping the line would be anything that made you feel bad.

You shouldn’t feel bad. Whatever the current state of your business you did something few people do.

Inside all those agencies you admire?

If they are growing, it’s a ****show.

They’ve just got the next set of problems.

The only way to get a perfect system is to stand still, stop growing, and wait for the end.

Then after you’ve closed your agency you can document that system and sell it to me on LinkedIn. I’m waiting, ready to click.

The hire that won't pay for themselves

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I need to hire someone vs I can afford to hire someone.

These are two similar statements from different parts of your body.

The analysis that you can afford to hire someone comes from the brain and the feeling of need comes from your gut.

Actually scrap that.

The need comes from your brain when you’re trying to juggle multiple projects and run a business.

There’s no time to analyse, the need is what makes you act.

But… can you actually afford that hire?

You walk it back.

You now have enough work for another person because you’ve just won a new deal or your existing clients want more work.

Two figures often pop into your head.

The first is the expected revenue from that new project. The second is the salary of that new person.

I’m gonna earn X amount a month from that new project, and that person is gonna get paid ‘annual salary divided by twelve’ per month.

It’s a quick piece of maths designed to assess the risk that you won’t be able to meet payroll.

Unfortunately it’s no good (although you did get the number of months in a year right 👍).

Why this maths fails

There are other costs of employing someone, like taxes and software costs and social costs. So unless you’re gonna employ them, not give them any software, have no company events and commit tax fraud, you haven’t actually modelled whether you can meet payroll.

The deeper problem: margin

The second reason it doesn’t work is because they need to contribute to margin.

Your business has:

overheads, this person needs to help cover them
growth targets, this person needs to make money on top of that so you can be profitable
management overhead: they need to pay for the time you can’t earn because you’re managing them

And most importantly they need to also contribute to margin so you can grow.

Adding the leadership and support of another person, the financial, cognitive, time, and effort overhead of another employee, and accepting that you might just cover their employment costs in return is a poor move.

It’s akin to taking on a new client at a breakeven rate. Not only are they gonna stop you growing, but you’re now paying an opportunity cost of everything else you could do with that time and effort.

Why your instincts get worse as you grow

It’s unlikely to be as bad as that, let’s give your brain some credit, even when it’s beaten down and overworked.

You probably are gonna make money from this person. You just don’t know how much. And as you grow, your ability to guess how much, without doing some proper maths, reduces.

You’re gonna have multiple people on projects, multiple projects at different rates. Bigger projects become less efficient because of the feedback loops and client management gets harder.

All this stuff is gonna move around, and your vibes are gonna be more and more off.

That little piece of mental maths is gonna put you in a spot where you’re not making enough money. And if that spot is with a big client or a big hire, you’re gonna find it a hard place to untangle yourself from. The process of fixing a low margin project is gonna take time and energy away from the rest of your growth.

Over the next few weeks we are going to do some maths together.

Next time you realise you’re too busy you’ll have something to reach for to give you the confidence that you can afford that new person, what to pay them, and what you need them to bill.

And as well as some sums we’ll make sure we understand the levers.

Because we are very 2026 right now and as the benchmark for what an agency needs to make from its people shifts we are going to need to see clearly the change we need to make.

Why are you faking your revenue?

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you owed another business money, would you put that down as revenue?

You wouldn’t. Obviously.

And yet, that’s basically what happens when you take a deposit or a prepayment, and declare it as revenue for that month.

If your business stopped straight after taking that deposit, that company would want that money back.

Your business hasn’t stopped (phew) but they want their work. You owe them work. So at the moment, that revenue is more like a debt.

A strange type of debt I admit, but work with me. The point is it isn’t money you’ve earned yet.

The same thing happens with retainers. Even if you offer a use-it-or-lose-it retainer, I bet that sometimes clients have a quiet month and you roll it over or adjust the amount. And even if you are strict, imagine this when you have scaled and aren’t the one keeping every client happy. It’s going to happen and it’s the same problem.

That revenue from the first month is now something you owe someone. They’ve paid you, but they haven’t got the value yet.

Your monthly analysis is built on bad data

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you get the deposit one month and deliver the project the next month. When you look at the revenue line for the next month, it’s going to be zero. Now you have one month with what is essentially a debt in the revenue line, and the next month: no revenue at all, a load of costs, and you make a loss.

If you take both months together, you get the true picture: the revenue and costs land in the same place, and you can see what you actually made.

Mentally, we’re all capable of looking at two months and analysing what went down.

No one is just looking at one of those months and saying, this month was amazing, this month was terrible.

And yet, when you put this in a real-world example, that’s exactly what you are doing.

But that mental analysis gets harder when you add more projects over more months with more billing points. And you will absolutely lose track. You will not know if that number in your revenue line is money you’ve earned or work you owe.

Things get particularly murky when you’re growing. Newer, bigger projects come in and inject cash into the system, which masks the fact that older projects aren’t as profitable.

And because you’re now having to deliver more with a team, your costs aren’t as flexible. You can no longer just do it yourself over the weekend. Every bit of work causes more cost to happen.

This means the margins on your lower rate work dip even further, but that dip is covered by the initial billing from the new higher rate project that just appeared.

Then you get towards the end of that project and the leakages start to appear (overruns, scope creep - those final invoices are rarely as profitable as the first ones you did).

A few months later, the new project’s profit isn’t as high. The old project is running along at close to break even. And potentially another even bigger project comes in and masks everything for a while longer.

It’s very easy to grow in revenue and stand still or go backwards in profitability and somehow not notice it.

You know what’s really cool? Accrual accounting

The solution to this is called accrual accounting. Put simply, it involves only declaring revenue when you’ve done the work that earns that revenue. If you want to examine the business month by month, then you have to have each month provide a true reflection of the business’s performance.

One way to achieve this would be to only bill when you do the work, billing each month for the work done that month. However, this stops us being able to deploy tactics around cash flow like deposits and being flexible with when we bill. And there’s really no need to lose the ability to do those things just to see our business clearly.

The way to approach it is to adjust your revenue line each month.

Accrual accounting stops cash masking performance. The date you raise an invoice and the date it gets paid are ignored. The amount of the invoice is all we’re interested in, and we only put it in our revenue line when the work that invoice is for gets done.

That means your deposit is not revenue. There won’t be anything on your revenue line that you haven’t done.

And because the money you earn from a project and the money you pay out in costs all happen in the same period now, you can take any project you want and see if it made money that month.

The January deposit shows up in February, where it belongs.

This gives you the monthly snapshot. You can see what you actually earned and what it cost you.

Buying triggers

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last week we pondered on marketing to people that aren’t in the market for your services right now. Reminder: that’s most of the people that read your content.

And to some readers it felt a bit passive. Content without the offer. Too patient.

But sending your offer to people that don’t want it is too spammy and ineffective.

Buying triggers are something you can bring into play to have the best of both worlds.

What a buying signal actually is

Way back when I started my first business (not my agency), the moment we became a limited company, we immediately received piles of letters from accountants offering accountancy, business card printers offering business cards, and the people that put your logo on pens had some pens to put our logo on just for us.

These people were watching the records at Companies House (which keeps a record of every company in the UK) and when a new one appeared they sent their offers to the registered address.

The creation of a company was a buying signal.

Now we had a company we had accountancy obligations to fulfil, people to give business cards to, and we had the urge to feel the rush of life’s ultimate ego trip: your logo on the side of a pen.

A buying signal is something you can see from the outside that increases the chances that the business might be ready to buy.

No silver bullets though

Your job is to consider what signals would mean someone was in the market for an agency. Specifically your agency. The more specific, the better the signal.

Because if you don’t make them specific, you’re just going to come up with the ones that everyone else did.

Like the accountants when I started my first business. It’s just going to be a load of noise.

And I can’t tell you them, because if I could then, again, everyone else would have thought of them.

A business getting investment might well be looking to spend some of that money. But if you think you’re the only person who’s thought that, you’re going to have to try harder. An update to website accessibility laws means people will probably be in the market for an audit, and you and several hundred other businesses will simultaneously be offering that.

Combine with your niche

If you know your ICP, then you should know their buying triggers. If you know exactly how they’ll respond to something like investment, then you can offer the right thing.

And if you can combine it with what keeps them up at night.

Ours was to know who their competition are (which is already of interest to them) and when a new business entered the market, or got a newsworthy piece of investment, we got in touch and suggested they take action.

This was useful information anyway and tapped into quite a specific trigger for them.

This is just part of the system

Buying triggers aren’t shortcuts.

They aren’t going to magically scale things.

But they’re an interesting layer to experiment with in your new business machine. If you can find one or two that work, it’s worth it.

And the process of creating them might mean you learn a bit more about your ICP.

How to leave a prospect unimpressed

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2 facts:

Getting people to read your marketing content is hard.
A very small percentage of the people who see your marketing are looking for an agency

So if people do read your marketing, it doesn’t make sense that the message you’re sending them is about how good you are.

If your reader’s problem isn’t “how do I find a good agency?” (and that hardly ever is their problem), then it isn’t interesting.

In-market. Out of market.

There’s a difference between a prospect who is actively looking for an agency and one who isn’t.

When they’re in the market, searching, comparing, and shortlisting, that’s the time to impress them. And you should carry on trying to impress them through the pitching and into closing the deal. Your latest projects, your thinking, your process. Everything you’ve got.

When they’re out of the market? They’ve got other problems. And you telling them about your latest case study won’t work.

No one likes someone that won’t stop talking about themselves.

What they actually care about

What they actually want to read, watch, or even pay to attend, is content about the other things keeping them up at night.

The pipeline they need to build. The enquiries they need to generate and capture. How their business is doing. The client they need to make happy. What their competitors are up to. How to find great people. What metrics to look at. How to grow.

Their actual pain-points.

99% of the time, that isn’t “how do I find a good agency?”

Ideas from the creator economy

There are businesses out there whose entire revenue is creating content, services, and events that just help people with their problems. These are often labelled the creator economy. Here’s the kind of thing they do.

Masterminds

A group of like-minded people brought together to support each other. The facilitator handles the introductions, the platform, the ops. They build an audience and pull them into groups so members get value from each other. Then they charge for it (you don’t have to). Arrange a dinner with your favourite clients and get them to invite their LinkedIn friends. You get the goodwill, the introductions, the reputation.

Deep dives

Think case study, but on someone else’s work. Why does it have to be your own? Why not do a case study on another success story your ICP would find interesting?

Check out Tom Orbach’s Marketing Ideas or the Growth in Reverse newsletter. These deep dive into people and businesses that have achieved marketing and newsletter success and works out how they did it. Case studies, in order to learn. Not to prove their own abilities. And the writers are cashing in because people crave this stuff.

If you think promoting work that isn’t yours is a risk, then don’t worry. Positioning yourself as someone who understands how success works and can communicate that isn’t going to do you any harm.

Courses and guides

Taking what you know that’s valuable to your ICP and building self-paced courses, in-person cohorts and email based guides. Work out what your prospect wants to know and start publishing.

Of course this is a lot of work, but you need to understand why this type of content is so effective, and work out your version.

Now yours is their favourite content

If you can identify a problem your ICP has that’s adjacent to the service you provide, one of those never-fully-solved problems, something they’re always working on, and keep creating content around it, keep helping them understand it and solve it.

Your content builds a proper list. Proper relationships. A genuine business asset.

They open your emails. They share your posts. They look forward to your newsletter.

And when they do need an agency?

They already trust you.

That’s impressive.

Only half of your marketing works

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marketing isn’t a job you get done and tick off.

Unlike most of our other to-dos, which are a closed system:

Receive feedback from client
Implement feedback
Share
Get signed off

Marketing’s system includes the whole of the economy:

Write LinkedIn post
Post LinkedIn post
Macroeconomics
Interest rates
Someone gives it a like

It’s chaotic.

But chaos shouldn’t put you off. You already navigate chaos, you just don’t always realise it.

The business itself is a chaotic system. Marketing and all these other elements combine together, along with the people you’ve hired and your clients, to create something very hard to predict. Yet, we do predict correctly that it will exist next month and the month after. We predict that by measuring the things we can (the financials and ops) and by using instinct and other intangibles.

Without thinking about it you wake up with a feeling about the mood of your team or the optimism of the market, your own sense of purpose, and whether it lines up with where this whole thing is going.

You trust your instincts about it, and maybe you just don’t have your instincts about marketing yet.

There’s a place you can get to where you just know what’s working and what’s going to work, even in the places that the numbers don’t reach.

There are some things we can measure like clicks on a CTA or number of people on our waiting list, and some other things we have to use instinct on like why a piece of content landed or whether that waiting list is just bots.

Compared with something like sales where you are close to the signals and the impact plays out in signed deals, marketing’s signals are scattered, hard to find and hard to isolate. As the saying goes: half of your marketing works, but no one knows which half.

The danger is that we can be left in a state of paralysis. Abandoning tactics, stopping posting because you can’t see it working.

The mistake isn’t doing marketing that doesn’t work, that’s just part of the job. The mistake is standing still instead of experimenting and learning.

Marketing is ticked off when someone makes an inquiry.

The routes to that are hard to predict until you have a system at scale, and even then, things change.

Get comfortable with the chaos.

Steal my forecasting template to see your future

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

While your business is playing out in real life, day by day, opportunity by opportunity, problem by problem, it’s also playing out in numbers.

The bank account and the invoices issued for payment vs your commitments and your take-home.

How much money you’re making or not making short term is apparent when you check your banking app.

How much money this is all going to make over the next 6 months is less obvious, but it’s vital to have an idea.

A ritual to strengthen, if you want to have some visibility of the future, and make better decisions, is that of forecasting.

The role of forecasting

Forecasting is not predicting the future. It’s showing the impact of what you are already predicting looks like.

You already predicting the future when you sit and think, “That big new project could come in, then there’ll be more money in the bank account”. Or, “Let’s give them the salary they want. I think we’ve got enough work to cover it.”

And you are certainly predicting when you imagine this whole agency journey turning out well.

Things don’t necessarily turn out the way you predict them to. In fact, they never do, otherwise, this would be easy and we’d all be millionaires.

Things change.

Forecasting is the ability to see the results of what you’re predicting and the impact of any change.

You’re already forecasting

An estimate for a client is a forecast. You take their brief, work out how many hours it’s going to take and which people you need for each bit, add it all together, and put it in writing.

Sometimes it’s the first time that someone’s actually collected all the information together and produced a number.

That’s a forecast for a particular project.

It answers the question: is this viable? Can the client afford it? And if we do it, is it worth it?

That project forecast also allows us to explore some scenarios:

What if the client reduces the scope a bit? What’s the cost now?
What if they negotiate a different rate? What does that do to the cost?

You switch the numbers and you get to see what will happen.

It doesn’t give us certainty because projects laugh in the face of their estimates.

But it tells us that the plan could work, and that’s valuable.

We need to do that for our whole agency.

The agency model seems simple. The team is going to do some work that the client is going to pay for. The team is going to get paid, there are some overheads, and then the founder keeps the rest.

Your model is checking the numbers make sense with the amount of work you’re doing, the amount of people doing it, what you’re charging, what you’re paying, and the amount you need to keep.

It answers the question: will this plan actually work?

Creating a model

Your forecast model needs to reduce the complexity of reality down to a set of moving parts you can adjust (revenue, wages, overheads, etc)

Put all the different moving parts into the same spreadsheet and do the sums. When you change one thing the model updates and shows you the outcome in terms of profit, overall revenue, overall costs.

You start simply and then start factoring things in.

Those extra factors might be things like how many leads you expect to get each month and how long they take to close, or how many billable hours you think each team member will do.

Theoretically the more moving parts the closer the model to real life but there is a law of diminishing returns here, and when your model becomes an attempt to accurately predict the future you know you’ve gone too far.

For example, here are three levels of sophistication for forecasting your revenue:

Basic: A single line. Think forward, work out all your different projects in your head, and write one number for what you expect to get each month.
More sophisticated: Break it out into revenue from existing clients and revenue from your pipeline. Maybe look back over previous months and create an average.
More sophisticated again: Take individual deals in your pipeline, apply a level of certainty to them, bring that number through, along with a client-by-client breakdown of the money they’ve committed and are likely to spend.

You can start simple and improve your model over time.

Time for Crime

Check out the example forecast and a further guide to creating your own here:

I want to see the future

Have fun!

In the event of any stealing this email cannot be used as evidence.

Why small agencies should hire in the Goldilocks Zone

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When looking to hire, one of the decisions that needs making is how experienced you want the person you’re hiring to be.

You normally start with junior people. It’s a combination of the financial commitment being lower and perhaps the founder who’s growing their leadership skills feeling they need to hire someone distinctly below them in terms of status and experience.

Perhaps a bit further along, when a junior employee didn’t work out or the extra effort of mentoring, training, and supporting in delivery turned out to be more than expected, you might say, “We need someone experienced, someone that can hit the ground running.”

Then they find out that hiring those experienced people means paying them more than the founders are getting paid, and that they come with a requirement for an environment that is as experienced as they are.

Hitting ground running, needs the ground they hit to be flat and familiar.

The place I saw repeatedly good hires coming from is the Goldilocks zone. Someone with just enough experience—on the cusp of becoming authoritative.

Let’s try and define it and why it’s great.

The Goldilocks Zone

There’s a moment in a person’s career when the ROI of hiring them is really high.

They have the confidence in their talent and are ready to learn how to apply it at a higher level.

They have just enough experience and they’re ready for the responsibility.

They are at their most passionate and engaged.

The compensation they want is partly paid through the experience and guidance you can give them and as they grow their value will stay ahead of the salary you pay them.

Why This Works for Small Agencies

The point is to say that small design agencies offer an environment and a level of opportunity that compensates for their ability to pay lower wages and hire a profile of person that is very loyal and very profitable.

Let’s look at the small agency environment first.

There is inherent mentoring.

The founders and senior team have to mentor in order to ensure delivery is of a high enough quality. They are not far removed from the team because the business is small. They are often still in delivery themselves, so they’re on the projects and they care deeply about the person’s success.

Impact is easy.

There are lots of things that the agency wants to achieve and not enough people to achieve them. Anyone who can step up and solve a problem, be that handling a client solo, organising a process, or bringing in a new lead, is going to have impact and be recognised.

Mobility is high.

The opportunity as a small purpose-led design agency is that the lack of structure means there’s a huge opportunity for moving up because there are vacuums to step into. The founder is wearing all the hats and if you show you can do it, you can try one of them on.

Why This Works for the Employee

The benefits for the employee are that you are also a bowl of porridge at just the right temperature too.

In a big agency, a junior position can get lost, not be given a chance to prove themselves, and end up stagnating. In a small agency, without the support, they can end up being leaned on too hard - delivering too much work unsupervised and not gaining the sophistication or getting to develop their skills. No one’s mentoring them, no one’s taking stock of where they are and working out how to move them to the next level.

The advantage of being just right is that they get the responsibility and the challenge, but with the safety net.

Someone on the rise can be shaped by your agency, unlike a high-salary hire who may struggle with different expectations.

Helping them realise their potential makes them value the opportunity as much as money.

What you end up with is someone connected to the business and loyal. Someone shaped perfectly to your culture, your values, and the mission you’re on. They’ll deliver your best work and be your best people. They’re the ones you’ll trust enough to take your eyes off the day-to-day and focus on growth.

The Mutual Benefit

You get amazing value out of them, your business model allows it.

Your agency can provide opportunities to those on the rise due to your founders’ experience and a safety net. Your business can afford to hire talented but less experienced individuals due to your experience and ability to handle situations.

You get great people when they’re on the way up at salaries that grow with them and aren’t immediately anchored beyond them. That is incredibly mutually beneficial. They get the chance to have an impact and get mentored on their journey. You get amazing talent at a great value salary.

The Long-term Payoff

It’s also incredibly rewarding for you to mentor and grow your own team, and for the team to work with each other; other people that are figuring it out and maturing into more complete professionals.

As they develop, they are changed by your agency, and they change your agency. You get the amazing feeling that comes with being part of that transformation and you get the business benefit of an amazing person at a salary you can afford.

When you look back in 10 years I guarantee you that several of the most important people in the history of your agency, people that went on to lead, will come into your agency in the Goldilocks zone.

You might not need to scale

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If a plant has the right environment and soil, it will grow.

When you put a plant in a pot, it gets as big as it can, given the size of the pot. Eventually, if you want it to get bigger, you have to change that pot.

We can stumble upon, through circumstance or design, an environment in which our business thrives. And then we can scale it, until we hit the edge.

Scaling: Growing in the Same Pot

Scaling is working out how to do more of what you’re already doing. The business gets bigger, but fundamentally it’s the same.

If you want to scale your billable team, to keep doing the same work but more of it, you might need layers of line management. You might need to tend more to people and culture, and training to keep their qualities, but it’s not a fundamental shift.

Or you might get your leads through ads, and you can scale by doing more ads. Same tactic, higher volume.

You’ll get bigger and it’s not easy. The business will look a bit different, but fundamentally it’s the same business, on the same course, doing more of the same thing.

The Edge of the Pot

The limits aren’t just related to team size. Any measurement of size you care to use - be it capacity, reach, impact, or financial performance - will hit a limit eventually.

Scaling those things will get harder and no longer make sense. The investment in scale will outweigh the benefit. And eventually it will stop.

Sometimes the edge of the pot is practical. The numbers stop working.

But sometimes the edge of the pot is just a feeling. You don’t want the business to run like it is. You’re more excited by an opportunity to be a different business. You don’t want to makethisbigger. You want to change.

That’s a great realisation. It’s time for a new pot.

Re-potting: Growing Something Different

Changing pots is more than just working out how to deliver more of what you understand. It’s understanding something new.

A new type of customer or service. A new way of billing. A new way of growing your reputation or a reputation for something new.

Re-potting means making a fundamental change to what the business is:

Adding something new- A new vision, a new set of expertise, someone to own project management and make it a value add, a new service line.

Taking something away- Stopping in-house development and going all in on design. Saying no to deals below a certain value, or removing all meetings.

Turning everything upside down- Changing how things work internally; handing out shares to every employee; launching a product; going 4 days a week; becoming the last no-AI agency in the world; banning Slack.

Move it to a new pot and you’ll be growing something different. Could be something better. Could be something more valuable.

But you’ve got to do it with intention. Choose what you’re growing. Choose if it needs a new pot. And choose what that pot looks like.

Now let’s try something different:I’ve created a prompt to help you work through this for your agency, it’s on my site here. Give it a whirl!

The three seats of marketing

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marketing feels chaotic and you don’t know what works.

Your problem is that you are thinking about doing marketing as one thing. A big complicated activity that only someone experienced can deliver.

To understand it start by breaking it down.

There are three different seats you need at the table in order to not only do marketing, but know that you’re doing it well.

Seat 1: Market insights

Understanding your market. Understanding the client, the industry, what problems people have, and what solutions they’re going to look for.

Seat 2: Strategy

With those insights, you have to work out a way to win. Which can be as simple as knowing what to post on LinkedIn, or as complex as a positioning strategy, a content strategy, channel strategies.

Seat 3: Execution

Actually doing the thing you decided to do. The LinkedIn posting, the networking, etc.

The mistake you can make is thinking of all of this as one activity - “marketing”.

Firstly, no-one can do all of these things really well, so you won’t be able to, so you’ll give up and not do marketing.

And if you don’t give up you’ll outsource and find an expert.

But if you’re outsourcing all three of these things together, then that won’t work either.

Because no one can do all of these things well. That was my ‘firstly’. I’ve lost track of my secondly. Let’s not worry and instead get into what you should do.

Your responsibility

The market insights seat is one you have to sit in as the founder.

Not sitting in it is basically not doing your job.

You can’t outsource this for two reasons.

Firstly, you need that market intelligence to lead your business. You have this in your head, it’s how you got here, you just need to get it out and organise it.

Secondly (nailed it), if you outsource it, the person you’re outsourcing it to just will never understand it as well as you do.

They might be a marketer for agencies, even specialising in your type of agency. But, as they’ll probably remind you in their pitch deck, positioning is about being different. There’s only one of your agency.

Your market insights are unique and you have to own them.

So if you want to do marketing well, outsourcing this bit means you’re already not doing it as well as you could be.

Then strategy.

Your responsibility about strategy is to understand it, believe in it, and ensure that it gets seen through until it’s either working or needs changing.

You don’t have to form the strategy. It’s fine to get someone more experienced to do that. But you can’t just get a PDF off them, shake hands and pay an invoice. You need to be involved.

You also need to make sure the strategy is independent from execution.

A common mistake is to outsource strategy to the executors.

There is an incredible amount of things you can choose to execute on. Common tactics, less common tactics, variants on tactics. Every channel’s got an expert. And every channel expert believes you should start with their channel.

If you just pick a channel, go and ask them, “How are you going to get more leads?” They will reverse engineer a strategy, probably asking you insight and strategy questions about your ICP and positioning and they’ll come up with a really tight-sounding strategy for their channel.

They won’t consider other channels, hugely limiting your strategy.

They’re a social media agency, so they’re going to recommend social. They do SEO, so they’re going to find SEO problems. They run ads, so ads are the answer.

That’s not their fault and it’s not dishonest. It’s their business model. Just like you believe in and recommend your own agency’s particular specialism.

They start with the tactic they sell and work backwards to justify it. That can’t be your marketing plan. You need to start with a strategy-agnostic strategy and then you can outsource the execution to someone brilliant and any extra strategic depth they bring is a value add.

The reality

In practice the three seats are an abstraction you need to be aware of. In reality they do blend.

Finding independent strategists is hard and finding executors who are great at strategy can be valuable (if they are doing the right channel for you, or you get lucky).

The three seats help you see clearly how it all works and the principles to stay on top of are:

Own market insights
Have strategy separate from execution
Don’t start execution first

The opportunity

So to recap: you have to sit in the market insights seat. You need to understand the marketing strategy work. And then you can outsource the execution.

But as well as a responsibility, getting involved in the right seats is also an opportunity.

When you own market insights and combine that with strategic thinking, something interesting happens.

You can do unique things.

And unique things are the best marketing.

Here’s what I mean: if you hand your client knowledge to an agency and say “go do marketing,” they’re going to run it through their standard playbook.

You’ll end up with marketing that looks like everyone else’s. Because they’re using the same approach as every other agency in your space.

But if you sit in seat 1 and understand seat 2, you can collaborate with execution partners and create something actually different.

Your deep understanding of the client + strategic marketing thinking = details that actually differentiate you.

This is why some agencies have marketing that feels authentic and distinctive while others feel generic and interchangeable.

It’s not that one hired better marketers. It’s that one owned their area while the other outsourced the whole thing.

You already have the unfair advantage (you know your client). You just need to protect it by staying in seat 1 and learning enough about seat 2 to direct seat 3 intelligently.

That’s how you create marketing that’s you understand and that’s actually yours.

Your best people aren't unicorns

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every time a good employee asks for a quick chat, it’s grimace emoji time. Because if they’re leaving, you have no idea how you’ll replace them.

You think if you could find more people like your best people, your problems would be solved. But there’s no one else like them, they are like unicorns. You got lucky meeting them and, next time you hire, you can’t hold out for someone that good, so you compromise.

But this is just a story you’ve told yourself, and it’s one that will limit you.

It’s supposed to be hard.

The reality is yes, good people are incredibly valuable. Yes, they are hard to find and hard to keep.

But finding and keeping them is a core part of the value you offer as an agency. And you have the power to do it - in fact, you’ve already proven you can do it. That’s why you have this irreplaceable person setting the standard.

The problem is you’re still relying on luck instead of working out what made you lucky.

One of the competitive advantages of having this small, incredible place to work is that you can make great people happy.

If anyone could do it, then there’d be no difference between you and the soulless agencies out there.

In fact, there would be no agencies at all because your clients would just bring the whole thing in-house.

You’ve got to make hiring good people a competitive advantage and you need to make it something you can do consistently.

Because if you can’t find more unicorns, then you are at risk of becoming less valuable.

So we need to stop relying on luck here and work out what makes us lucky.

It’s not all about them

In our personal relationships, there’s a question you shouldn’t ask if you want a peaceful life: if you’d met someone else, would you have fallen in love with them? Is your soul mate the only one?

You need to stop thinking about your best employees in the same way.

Everybody brings a unique set of skills, experience, and approach. But those skills, experience, and approach are not unique individually, it’s the combination.

And the purpose of your agency and the environment you operate in are part of the recipe.

Your good and another business’s good are different. A great person is a great person in the context of your business.

The unicorn is in fact the intersection of a set of characteristics with your business.

You’re not looking for perfect people. You’re trying to find the perfect people for you.

You can increase the chances

What makes up the perfect person? If they were an ICP or persona, how would they be described?

If you can break them down into that set of characteristics, then you can start to build a picture that you can go and look for.

And to increase your chances, narrow down those characteristics to the important ones.

Do you need someone with the exact skills, or is it the ability to pick up new skills quickly? Do they need to be an extrovert and exude confidence, or is it the passion for the craft that you want to see?

There are certain things that make that unicorn so valuable to you, and others that come as part of the package that you don’t need.

This isn’t lowering a standard, it’s defining one. And the tighter your definition, the easier it is to find the right person.

This is your offering

Your agency is nothing more than the people who’ve decided to identify with it. If those people aren’t good, that’s bad news. If they aren’t great, you have a ceiling.

So you can’t afford to rely on luck. You need to know your unicorn when you see one.

Start by breaking down your best person into the characteristics that actually matter to your business. Narrow that list to the essentials. Now you’ve got something you can actively look for.

Because the difference between an agency that scales and one that stays stuck isn’t whether unicorns exist. It’s whether you know how to find them.

The art of marketing without marketing

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every business does marketing.

You can’t choose not to market. You can say you don’t. You can have zero marketing budget. But it’s still happening.

You are interacting with the market. Every time you post on LinkedIn, have a coffee with a past client, or answer “what do you do?” at a networking event, you’re marketing.

And you’re probably doing a good job of it.

If you subscribe to the idea that the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing, then authenticity is the secret sauce.

And if your marketing is so authentic that even you don’t recognise you’re doing it, there’s an argument to say you’re doing it very well indeed.

If you’re still struggling with this, if you think you’re different, that yours is the agency that hasn’t done marketing, that you got here by some other process, then spend a moment thinking about your clients, and the services you provide, that they say they don’t do.

Branding

Everyone already has a brand even if they don’t think they do. Your brand is whatever other people think about you.

This is a good thing to say if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about.

You have to separate the intentional activity of branding from the brand.

Just like every business has a brand even if they don’t invest in branding, every business markets itself even if they don’t invest in marketing.

We don’t really have a convenient noun for this passive state of marketing, like “brand.” Our noun could be “market presence” or “interface with the market,” but those aren’t words a normal person would say. And that leads to the belief that if we aren’t marketing, there’s simply nothing there.

Which isn’t true.

The Marketing You’re Already Doing

Write down the last three leads you got that were worth anything. Ones that you either wrote a proposal for or were ready to.

Next to each of these leads, write down where it came from.

If you “don’t do marketing”, you’re probably writing “referral” or “network” next to these. These are two legitimate channels. Agencies that do do marketing have strategies for these channels. They invest in them and track the results.

There might also be “found us through the website” or “found us on Google.” Perhaps even the emerging “found us on an LLM” will appear.

For each of the channels write down what you’ve invested into them.

It was probably time. You went to a meetup (4 hours). You had coffee with two past clients (3 hours total). You posted on LinkedIn three times (1 hour). That’s 8 hours invested into your network channel. These actions are the tactics you’ve used for each of these channels, and the time you spent on them is your investment.

What you have now is the most basic representation of your current marketing plan. The channels you are investing in and the results you are getting.

You can see where this is going

A much bigger audit is possible. If you know how much your time costs, you’ve already got cost per acquisition metrics within reach. But given that at the beginning of this article we didn’t believe we did marketing, getting deep into the KPIs feels a bit much.

Don’t sign up for a marketing course. Don’t hire an agency. Don’t start posting daily on LinkedIn. First, understand what’s already working.

Don’t do intentional marketing until this is up and running and you understand and track the channels you’re using, how to track the leads coming from those channels, and how to track your investment into them.

Your Secret Weapon

Let’s finish with some good news. The marketing you’re actually doing (this networking, these referrals, this showing up authentically everywhere you go) is what everyone else is trying to achieve.

It’s the secret weapon of the small founder-led agency. Because you don’t have to try very hard.

Sure, marketing is a hat the founder has to wear. But unlike some of your other hats, the accounting hat, the HR hat, the operations hat, this hat, is one you were born to wear.

The return on investment of wearing this hat is big because you have that authenticity. You have the understanding of the craft. You have the understanding of your customer.

If you add an understanding of what’s working and what activities get the most bang for your buck, then you have a brilliant marketing plan.

Setting goals for your agency: why arbitrary deadlines actually work

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

No one who runs a business can resist the temptation to set some goals around the arbitrary point in time that is the start of the calendar year though, surely?

It’s the most important arbitrary point in time after the end of the financial year.

Remember the point is setting the goals (very visionary) not basing your happiness on whether you achieve them (too harsh).

The onboarding framework: using behaviours to assess new hires

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Last time I promised a step by step way to assess new hires quickly rather than wait for the end of a probation period.

🌟And here is the guide for the first 4 weeks of your new hire

One thing the guide talks about is behaviours. So you have a choice of where to start.

Behaviours are about more than just onboarding, they are a powerful way to install values, engage and reward your best people, give feedback and make hard decisions.

Those hard decisions include, but are not limited to, passing probation.

The problem

There are ways of telling people what we want from them. On a broad level we have values, we define these for the business. One of them is always “human”. They are meant to define what is important so you attract and keep the right people.

The other is feedback.

In fact there are 2 things that every progressive business is doing right now

Telling themselves to be “Human”
Trying to implement a feedback culture with the help of a book.

Both of these tactics have issues which behaviours can solve.

Values are vague

Not just the human one or the hilarious but self-owning ‘don’t be a dick’. The point of these is that they resonate with people, outlining a concept and letting people apply their own interpretation.

Their own interpretation is the problem. We need a single interpretation

Feedback needs a trigger.

One of the problems with feedback is knowing when to give it. The book saysall the time. But that’s not how the world works.

Knowing your behaviours means you have specific examples of when to give feedback and you have something to point at when you have the (sometimes less than comfortable) feedback chat.

And this is for good and bad feedback remember!

Behaviours

But when it comes to the crunch and you need to give feedback or justify a decision you’ll need to be specific.

To achieve that we need to define the specific behaviours you do and don’t want to see. This will help you spot them and will give you something to refer to when giving feedback.

These can be added to over time and can also be used to outline to existing staff what your values look like in action. Useful!

You can/should open this up to your team. What behaviours do they value and what gets them riled? This is proactive radical candour. Everyone loves clarity over what will be rewarded and what will be frowned upon.

And your best people will want to contribute creating a virtuous loop that both lets you know what your team wants to see and creates more ownership.

Run this exercise:

Then tidy up the behaviours so you have something that can be shared. The format of “We value __ instead of __” works, but whatever you like.

This should have moved you from:

We value proactive people

We value people who seek feedback on work-in-progress rather than working in a silo

Now the next time someone fails to let the team in on WIP you can point to this behaviour rather than just saying they weren’t proactive.

Because proactive means different things to different people. Charging forward without asking for help could be seen as proactive. Behaviours define what it means to be valuable to your team and they define the standard to not slip below

It’s a gift

You’ll thank yourself for defining these. It’s a gift to the you of the future who needs to explain the standards required for excellence.

Why three-month probation periods don't work (and what to do instead)

Dear Agency Founder — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Let’s talk about probation periods.

Once upon a time, in a company far far away, someone said that there should be a three-month period at the beginning of someone’s employment when the notice period is only a week. You know, in case they’re really bad.

No one knows what type of company they ran. How big it was. Or why three months.

But this is now just what we pass down. From employer to employee. And then when the employee starts a business they pass it on themselves.

Crazy how you’ll adopt a big company HR policy like probation periods without thinking, but you’ll reject other useful things big companies do like “business development.”

I did probation periods too. We all did. It’s just the rules of the game.

The rules could do with a bit more detail too. Like what to do during the probation period.

We agency founders generally employ the following method at first:

Get to three months, realise it’s time to decide about probation, and then have to make a decision on the spot.

Everyone chips in their opinion, trying to work out if the person is actually bad or if it’s just been a rough three months.

Most of the time they’re waved through even if they’re not quite right, and they stick around for years and hold you back.

Every now and again, they don’t make it through probation and you don’t use the week’s notice, of course. Because who on earth dismisses someone with just a week’s notice, even if they’re allowed. The whole thing is a huge and horrible surprise for them and for you as founder, one of the bad days of running your business.

And then you get to find out from the reaction of everyone else in the business whether this was the right decision.

Three Months Is No Good

A decision date which gets set and forgotten. That date is just made up. Someone said three months once.

The existence of that date means that no decisions are made before it, and by three months people are on client work, halfway through designs, exhibiting promising and worrying behaviour. They’ve formed bonds within the team.

Why are we waiting three months to decide if someone’s a good hire?

Because every day that the wrong hire is in your company is a day of damage. And every day you aren’t confident they’re ready for client work is an extra day of uncertainty for you.

ASAP is the target. Not three months.

Three months is, at best, some kind of backstop in case you’ve forgotten to make a decision. A final chance. Not a plan.

What if we started again here? What if we knew what decision we should make and could make it earlier than three months?

What to Do Instead

The 1-2-1 Onboarding Framework. Stop writing your 30-60-90 plans. Give it 4 weeks.

Week 1: Welcome them, get them set up, and brief them on a two-week assignment that mirrors real client work.

Week 2-3: They complete the assignment. It’s designed with three levels, a detailed brief they must follow, a loose prompt that tests how they create something new, and an open request that lets them show initiative. They work with your team. You’re available, checking in, observing where they shine and where they might need support.

Week 4: You sit down together. Run back through what they did. Point out what they did really well. Identify areas where they might need support. Decide if they’re ready for client work or need more support in specific areas first.

In a worst-case scenario you realise that it’s not going to work and you are making a hard decision.

What is this? Dear Heartless Agency Founder?

Well, ok, I agree. But knowing this after 4 weeks means you can outline what needs to improve and give them a chance to work on it. People are human and new jobs are stressful. If you have found a weakness you can isolate it and work with them on it.

Second chances are allowed. In fact, they’re easier to give when you have specific evidence about what needs to improve.

The difference is:

The decision happens in week 4, not week 12
You have evidence to point to (for you and them)

And this isn’t all about finding bad hires, it’s about setting them up for success. You learn where they shine, where they need help, and what support to give them before their first client meeting.

The assignment design is what makes this work.